


more than just

by grainjew



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Episode: s12e10 The Timeless Children, Gen, Tecteun is the Other, ft. seven’s devious secretive mind, in which i drain the cartmel masterplan hints through a timeless child shaped sieve, or something like that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:26:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24900787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grainjew/pseuds/grainjew
Summary: “The Hand of Omega,” he tells her, perched over his umbrella in one of Coal Hill School’s interior staircases, “is a mythical name for Omega's remote stellar manipulator, a device used to customize stars with. And didn't we have trouble with the prototype…”Ace leans forward, quizzically. He wonders what caught her attention; there’s an observant quality to her she hardly realizes she possesses. “We?”For just a moment, just a second within a second, he stops moving.The Seventh Doctor investigates his past.
Relationships: Seventh Doctor & Ace McShane
Comments: 27
Kudos: 67





	more than just

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kagehana_tsukio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kagehana_tsukio/gifts).



> dialogue drawn from remembrance of the daleks, silver nemesis, and battlefield. theyre delightful serials go watch them  
> this fic was such a tempting concept that i had to write it even though i have not written doctor who fic in approximately 7 years. and yet, all this time later, my love for seven and ace stands eternal
> 
> dedicated to tsu, because she’s a terrible enabler and it’s her fault me getting back into dw happened at all. go check out her [gifsets](https://tsukana.tumblr.com/tagged/tsu-gifs) they’re very nice

He meets Tecteun.

The figure is unfamiliar. She stares as it comes closer, tall and strange and pale, stares as it crouches down in front of her.

"Well, well, what have we here?" it says. Its voice is melodic, kind. It smiles. "My name is Tecteun. What is yours, child?"

She blinks, and doesn't answer.

It takes the Doctor a long, slow while to realize how much he loves a good plan, in this body.

There is that disaster with the Rani first, of course, him too deep in her webs to come up with anything but frantic counter-plans, and then there’s getting used to having a temper with a fuse longer than two seconds, and then a good while of running around trying to make up for his previous body's moodiness and for the whole incident where he got Mel confused with the Rani by taking her on vacations, and it really is _delightful_ to realize he can play the spoons this time around. So it’s a slow build, this realizing how easy it is to nudge the lives around him with a single well-placed word and how simple to topple empires with a single well-laid plan. How precarious, the universe is.

It gives him time to think, too. Blundering into a situation and improvising his way out is its own kind of rush, and the one most of his previous selves had preferred (and, of course, most of his plans do involve a lot of running around, because some things never change), but careful manipulation lets him sit back and catalogue his own impulses, his own instincts. Lets him trace the thoughts he thinks and the things he does back to their source. Lets him realize that sometimes, that source is hidden from him.

Lets him prod at the back of his mind, and come away with blank-eyed, disremembered fear.

“Are you _thinking?_ ” says Mel. She’s got her hands on her hips, which he thinks is rather unfair.

“Yes,” he says, tapping a rhythm on the TARDIS console. He is still stretching himself out in this body, mapping his new self and discovering its quirks and weaknesses. It's a process that takes far longer than the original post-regenerative disorientation. Up to a year or more, sometimes. It turns out this body is very musical, but in a staccato sort of way, interested and punctuated and hardly melodic at all. Not fond of words where a line of instrumentation will do.

“I'm just not used to you doing that _silently,_ ” she explains. Tapping his fingers is hardly silent, but his previous body was loud enough that he forgives the hyperbole. “Used to be you just had to follow the monologue.”

“Well, I'm hardly that person anymore, and thank goodness for small blessings,” he huffs. “You’ll find me much improved now.”

Mel rocks back and forth on her heels like she's trying to make a decision, and then says, “So, what were you thinking _about?_ ”

“Oh, this and that.” He gestures around the console room. “The color yellow, memory, the unplumbed inner depths of my psyche… The usual.”

“Right, trying to get in your head is an effort in futility,” says Mel flatly. 

He shrugs. It’s hardly his fault she’s too human to connect the dots between his thoughts. It’s hardly his fault he can’t explain the way his regeneration seems to have left him fascinated with the inner workings of the mind, and his mind more than most, left him fascinated with the specters taunting him at the back of it that slip his attention if he thinks on them too long. He taps out a lullaby on the console, some old Gallifreyan piece he hardly remembers, and he thinks. He considers, he reaches out to the TARDIS, asks her to brace him if he gets knocked back. Perhaps if he just, if he _just… there._

She shudders. Tecteun’s smile didn’t used to be terrifying.

Well, that’s hardly helpful. 

Maybe… 

Nope, blinding headache.

“Hey, Doctor,” says Mel, and she’s gone all perky again in that way he learned to fear the moment she stepped onto the TARDIS. Every word spoken sends daggers through his aching brain. Must be a massive block, to cause this harsh of a backlash. _Fascinating._ “I wonder how _this_ body feels about carrot juice! Surely _now_ you have good taste?”

“Carrot juice is not _good,_ ” he says, grimacing. “And we already established that.”

“Never hurts to try!” she says. She must have gone to the kitchen while he was giving himself headaches, because she’s carrying a pitcher of the stuff.

“Curiosity killed the octopus,” he objects. He lets her force some down his throat anyways, though, and adamantly doesn’t tell her that it even helps a little with the headache. Ah, fascinating. This body has the capacity for pettiness.

He has spent more time in the Matrix than any living Time Lord short of the Keepers of the Matrix or the Lord Presidents themselves. That is not saying much, especially given that — to his shame — he has _been_ the Lord President, and especially given that the near totality of his time in the Matrix has been spent fighting for his life. 

But it's enough to have a rudimentary sense of the place, to understand how meaning is layered there like stratified sediments, millenia upon millenia of mental dust mounded up into stories. 

He has only touched the topsoil of it, he knows. He has only disturbed the dust, scattered the last few thousand years of thoughts into shape. He wonders, sometimes, often, what he would find if he were to take a shovel to the place and dig until he hit bedrock. The curiosity inherent is one of the only things that could tempt him back to Gallifrey.

But then, he has hardly hit the bedrock of his own mind, yet. There was a flash of something deep-buried when he fought Morbius, so long ago, something he has never been able to reach since. One mind, first, and the assembled minds of billions of Time Lords after. All in good time.

It’s an afternoon in 1963, as the humans reckon time. If he concentrates, he can feel the echoes and edges of other selves nearly touch, swerve, break away. This is such an important _timeplace_ for him, one of those odd little moments with enough personal weight they hang like fixed points, and so he keeps coming back, no matter how bad a habit it is. There’s a sentimentality in him that he just can’t seem to get rid of.

And now he’s brought the Daleks back with him. He rather hopes Ian and Barbara won’t hear of this when they arrive in two years’ time; it would hardly do for them to worry over a problem he has well in hand. Ace, too, but she is owed an explanation or two, with how insistent she’s been. Just enough information for her to puzzle out the rest herself, clever girl. Clever, stubborn girl, with such a knack for making him explain himself, and for making him feel.

“The Hand of Omega,” he tells her, perched over his umbrella in one of Coal Hill School’s interior staircases, “is a mythical name for Omega's remote stellar manipulator, a device used to customize stars with. And didn't we have trouble with the prototype…”

Ace leans forward, quizzically. He wonders what caught her attention; there’s an observant quality to her she hardly realizes she possesses. “We?”

For just a moment, just a second within a second, he stops moving.

“Tecteun, did you _have_ to bring the child?”

Tecteun laughs, and ruffles her hair. She smiles up, but stares around Omega's workspace instead of at Tecteun. “Why not? Some science is perfect for a young mind, no?”

There’s a glass ball with smoke inside, swirling and swirling like how a galaxy swirls when you look from above. Tecteun grabs her shoulder when she tries to go poke at it, though.

“This science can — and has — sent stars supernova,” says Omega. “I'd rather not have a young mind — or worse, young hands — anywhere near it. Now if you please, Tecteun, a hand with the refractory lances? And do keep your child away from the active experiments; I’d hardly like to see her explode.”

We?

"They," he says, and smiles disarmingly.

His plan goes marvelously, last-minute complications aside, but his thoughts keep skipping back to the unthinking way he’d said _we,_ and to the memory of Omega’s workspace fading even now into mist. 

The Hand of Omega likes him, listens to him, let itself be stolen by him. But when he asks it, _do you know do you know do you remember,_ it is silent.

Oh, he _hates_ not having the answers.

He consoles himself on that point by carefully maneuvering his pieces into checkmate, and knowing that it is only a matter of time until this game, at least, is in his hands. And by the fact that his deception is structured so as to require him to enjoy himself mocking Davros.

“You flatter yourself, Doctor,” says Davros. 

_No, you,_ the Doctor thinks snidely. It is almost a pity that he has a plan going here; comments like that are _just_ a moment aside from the image he is trying to project. The wrong kind of mockery. 

“In the end,” continues Davros, as though he thinks he is important in the grand scheme of the cosmos, “you are merely another Time Lord.”

Regeneration energy, just out of reach, bubbling under his skin like an endlessly fizzing soda. Old High Gallifreyan, slipping past his teeth in class like a disremembered mother tongue. Impressions he’d always had, around the names of the Citadel’s founders. His grandmothers had never figured out why he cried at bedtime stories of the Other. He never had either. And that old petty certainty that Omega didn’t like him, even before they met the first time. Why a Time Lord raised on glorified myths of Rassilon was so willing to believe the worst of Gallifrey’s most beloved ancestor. That memory, earlier, and others before. He has time, these days, to think about things like that. Sort them in his mind until they start to make a shape. 

And Davros has given him _such_ a good opener.

“Oh, Davros,” he says, softly, gently, just a tiny step from laughing or from showing teeth like a feral dog. He does let himself smile, though. Just a little. One small indulgence. “I am _far_ more than just another Time Lord.”

Most things, when it comes down to it, are plans. The veining in a leaf is a plan; the stitching of a shirt and the movement of the stars. Gallifreyan politics are a tangled stack of plans, old enough to rot and so easy — so _tempting_ — to knock over with just a flick of the finger. But he would rather keep his relationship with Romana intact, at least until such time as necessity bids him ruin it, so he keeps his meddling hands away. He much prefers his friends to like him back.

He circles the TARDIS console, flipping idly at switches. She picked the destination this time, at Ace’s insistence. Ace thought the TARDIS would be more likely to bring her some place with explosive pyrotechnics than the Doctor’s distaste or her own inexperience, and he could hardly refuse either of their whims. And someday Ace will realize that the TARDIS holds just as many schemes in her wiring and her corridors as either of them keep in their minds. Time and space and plans… 

All these memories, instincts, age-old impressions: there is a purpose to them. A plan to them, or at least a meaning. There has to be, there _has_ to be, and if he assumes that: he can decipher the rest of it.

A plan implies a planner. And sometimes that planner is chance, or nature, or the universe, but this all seems more deliberate than that. Conscious, purposeful. And most importantly, not of his own design. He knows how his own plans fit together, all the interlocking pieces of them. He knows that they have an endpoint, a purpose, a target. He knows that they rely perhaps overmuch on manipulation and actions in the moment, and he knows that they are changeable, adaptable things he has mapped the whole of so that he can mold them according to the situation. This doesn’t feel like his own work at all, this leaving him at sea with memories _not-his-own-yet-his_ and nothing to play those clues against. Perhaps a future self fulfilling a paradox loop? But he would have tasted the energy of it. Perhaps a past regeneration, but he knows how his past selves planned, and he knows his own history. (Does he?) 

Perhaps it is the child he keeps catching glimpses of, but she is never, _never_ in control.

Well, he doubts this is his own work. If nothing else, he would do a much better job of wiping his own memory; it would hardly do to cause an unwarranted paradox and he cannot think of reasons other than the protection of the Web of Time to engage in such an action. And although it would be like him to leave himself hints, he would hardly do it in this way. His first face especially was too impulsive and abrasive for a long-term scheme such as this appears to be. 

And it all seems so tied up with Rassilon and Omega. _Fascinating._

So, a conscious planner, likely to do with the founders of Gallifrey. Or someone dedicated enough to construct false memories, erase them imperfectly, and then wait nearly a millennium for them to slowly resurface, but the instincts and impulses had always felt _real._ Falsities, no matter how elegantly constructed, can only do so much. He of all people would know. But if he discounts the possibility of false memories, the implications left are enormous. Impossible, even, but he hardly got where he is now by discarding the impossible. A memory of falling, falling, wind in her robes and her hair, sky stretched out above— 

“Pro _fe_ ssor!” shouts Ace. She dashes back into the TARDIS, slamming the door shut behind her for extra noise. “Come _on,_ there's free food _and_ a forest fire!”

“I was thinking,” he grumbles. But he reaches for the thread of thought and realizes it’s gone. Later, then. Ace's forest fire now. It’s the least he can do for her.

“But I know your secrets!” protests Peinforte, and the Doctor wonders what exactly she does know as he watches the last pieces of his plan click into place. Nemesis had told her something, possibly even something important. Something she felt secure enough to threaten him with, and that Nemesis would know about. There are so many gaps in his memory. He is almost tempted to ask her to fill one.

“Very well, tell them,” he says, because he wins either way.

Peinforte glares. She is desperate now, in the sense that she is counting on him to be desperate. Pity that he isn’t. "I shall tell them of Gallifrey, tell them of the old time, the time of chaos…"

“Be my guest,” says the Doctor.

“Your secrets—”

“The secrets of the Time Lords mean nothing to us,” announces the Cyberleader, impatient, and the Doctor feels smugness and disappointment coil together in his gut. There goes that opportunity. But he'd have other chances to dig up his own secrets, and he can hardly complain about the horrified look on Peinforte's face.

“Exactly,” he says, and smiles.

He remembers Rassilon looking at _him-plural,_ after Borusa was trapped in the worst kind of immortality. (Mawdryn’s punishment might well have been worse, but it all equalizes after a certain point. To each their own individual horror.) 

There had been a light in Rassilon's eye then, clever and curious and cruel, and he wonders now what _exactly_ Rassilon had been hoping to find out when he asked, “And what of you, Doctors? Do you claim immortality too?”

He wonders now what Rassilon had learned, from his frantic denial.

Merlin! He _is-was-will be_ Merlin. He keeps his face unruffled with an effort of will, but he can’t help the little thrill of delight that runs through him. While, yes, it does absolutely sound like something he would get involved in, and while most of his mind is occupied trying to untangle the schemes his future self _has-will_ put in place, he has spent far too much time with the humans of twentieth-century Britain to be immune to the news. 

Ace isn’t nearly as impressed, which is just as well. He ought to visit a supernova with her later.

He plays the role with glee, picking up every hint he can from his future self and the people he _will know._ There is a point where magic and technology become indistinguishable, and he and Morgaine dance in that point, chalk circles and blasts of lightning in a duel of wits. He hasn’t had this much fun in a decade.

Ah. His own handwriting, or handwriting similar enough that it can only be his. Even the Valeyard wrote _-will-write-never-will-write_ in the same hand; some things, it appears, chase him across regenerations. 

_Dear Doctor. King died in final battle. Everything else propaganda. -The Doctor. PS, Morgaine has just seized control of the nuclear missile._

“I could have given myself more warning,” he complains, even though he knows the paradox-loop would hardly allow it. What a terribly rude face he must wear, in the future. Not even an apology for the timing!

Still, he takes the message for the help it is, rude and breaking the Laws of Time or no.

 _Merlin, Prince of Deceit,_ Morgaine calls him. Back on the TARDIS, goodbyes said to old friends and new, Ace in her room pining over Shou Yuing, he sits down with a handwritten manuscript-copy of _Historia regum Britanniae_ and smiles over it. Prince of Deceit. He suspects it was meant as an insult, but he quite likes it. It sits nicely next to Oncoming Storm and Destroyer of Worlds, something slightly subtler to offset the naked menace of those two names.

It’s three revolutions and two supernovas later that he realizes the future matter of Merlin has distracted him utterly from his investigation into his mind and his past, and he curses.

He meets Omega.

“Oh, Tecteun, you're back already.”

The lab is massive. She's seen all sorts of things, travelling with Tecteun, but never something quite like this, with all sorts of machines and globby things she can hardly guess the purpose of and diagrams piled in stacks taller than her.

“Already?” says Tecteun. Her lips pull down in a pout. “Twelve years hardly merits an _already!_ What about a ‘how have you been, found anything interesting, Tecteun, my dear childhood friend who has been off-planet for twelve years?’”

The figure Tecteun was talking to turns around, but she can't see much of it because of all the clutter. “Well?” it says, impatiently. “ _Have_ you found anything?”

“As it happens, I have,” says Tecteun, and links a hand with her. “Child, this is Omega. He can be a bit grumpy, but I'm sure he'll like you just fine if you say hi!”

He meets Omega.

The antimatter universe is unfamiliar and uncomfortable, and hardly his ideal vacation spot (although the construction in it is really rather remarkable), but at least he hasn't had to listen to his last face's inane ramblings since he got here, which is altogether a notable improvement from the matter universe.

And then Omega arrives, portentous and dramatic.

It's equally a relief and an alarm. He'd known since he got here whose universe this was, somehow he'd known, something had hummed familiarity through his bones. But he lets himself be surprised. He is surprised; he can hardly believe Omega managed to eke out life on the other side of a black hole. He is surprised. Why isn't he surprised?

Why does Omega know his name?

Fenric is an ancient being, an Old God, a creature from the dawn of time. He is not the first ancient deity the Doctor has met, nor the last, nor even the most impressive. The only thing significant about Fenric, really, is that this time the Doctor is paying enough attention to question the way energy sings _recognition_ from under his skin.

_Cross the stars and back to home_

_The Other and her Child roam_

_Cross from death to life again_

_A crash, a light, and then, and then—_

He catches himself humming and makes a face, but at least it isn’t the rhyme about Zagreus this time, and at least Ace isn’t in the room. Several of his human friends have informed him at great length over the years that Gallifreyan nursery rhymes are not the sort of thing anyone sensible raises a child on, and have never accepted his counterpoint that “Ring Around the Rosy” is just as bad. Tegan had been the worst about it, opining that it wasn’t any wonder him and the Master had turned out the way they had, listening to that sort of thing as growing up. 

He really doesn’t get it. Childrens’ literature is almost definitionally horrifying to an adult with an understanding of fear and loss, which is why it belongs to the children. The Doctor has his own hypotheses about why the Master is the way he is (present tense, of course, because he knows better than to assume the Master died with the cheetah planet), and while a few figure the frankly abhorrent minutiae of Time Lord society, none of them figure nursery rhymes. And more importantly, in his experience nursery rhymes are both utter nonsense and one of the universe’s greatest repositories of forgotten knowledge. 

How interesting, then, that he should find himself humming this particular one. Everything seems to come back to children, lately.

He calls Romana long after Ace has gone to sleep one night, when the soft hum of the TARDIS is the only accompaniment to his thoughts. She looks at him, bleary-eyed from Presidential paperwork and lack of sleep, and nearly hangs up on the spot. 

“Hello, Doctor,” she says instead. “I presume you'll be telling me how you managed to hack into one of the most secure communications devices in the universe?”

“I've already sent along the details and a proposed solution to the exploit,” he replies. Of course he's left a few back-doors for himself. Her people will almost certainly find and remove them, but so goes the dance.

“Excellent," she says. She folds her hands. “What’s the occasion? You’re hardly one for social calls.”

He hums. They’re speaking a hodge-podge mix of languages, their own personal patois. They’d gotten into the habit partially because the TARDIS had always been temperamental about translating even spoken Gallifreyan to the locals, and partially because the Doctor had after long effort convinced Romana that being stuck in the confines of their mother tongue was as boring as being stuck on Gallifrey. “Say, Romana, what do you think of Rassilon?”

She blinks, the only trace of surprise on a face schooled to calm. “He was a hero. He founded Time Lord society and won victory over the Great Vampires,” she answers obligingly. “May I ask why?”

“Call it curiosity. But I’m asking for your opinion, not propaganda out of an Academy textbook.”

She laughs quietly, and the Doctor is so glad to see her smile that he almost regrets the call. “Got me. But I must admit I haven’t spent much thought on the subject.”

He raises an eyebrow. “I didn’t realize there was anything in the universe you hadn’t considered in arduous detail.” Her lip twitches. He’d known she’d take the statement as a compliment. “You know I have a good reason to be asking this.”

“I know you have _a_ reason, but I’ll be the judge of _good,_ ” she says, in the unimpressed tones of a travelling companion who has been talked one too many times into standing in a three-hour line for mediocre ice cream. That face of his had loved his sweets. “And more to the point, I can hardly discuss state secrets with a renegade.”

“Ah, so you do have an opinion,” he says. He leans against the console, shifting his weight. Maybe Evelyn was right about the console room needing a few more chairs. “And a controversial one, I take it.”

One of his only regrets with regards to his favored method of handling the responsibilities that come with being appointed Lord President of Gallifrey — that is, running away — is that he has never managed to stick around long enough to actually be briefed on Gallifrey’s dark secrets and hidden atrocities. That knowledge, and access to the Matrix, would make this whole ordeal so much simpler. But Romana is his next best option.

“History tends to overstate the qualities of its notables,” says Romana diplomatically. “You yourself have named Gallifrey one of the most corrupt and evil places in the universe, and I am regularly learning more to support that claim. Ours is a society built on false premises. We both know that.” There is an exhaustion in her eyes that he’d never seen while they were travelling, and a determination that is intimately familiar. “But as its President, I have a duty to keep its secrets even as I have a duty to make it be better.”

She’s given him enough, in between the lines of giving him nothing at all. He has confirmed that there are secrets buried in the heart of Gallifrey that implicate even its revered founders, and he has confirmed that Romana is still herself — passionate, intelligent, determined to do good — under the mantle of the Presidency. They walk different paths, now, but he can still trust her. Perhaps he can even trust her with Ace.

He’s proud of her, he realizes, for growing up and growing into leadership, for keeping her principles and her hearts despite her position. For settling down, and using that settling down to take on Gallifreyan politics until they bend to her reforms. He knows deep in him, past the point where he lies to himself, that such a sacrifice is beyond him.

He opens his mouth to tell her all that, and then closes it. Neither of them have been entirely truthful this conversation. He can’t bring himself to start now. Instead, he says, “I’ll leave you to your paperwork, then. Thank you for the help.”

She looks at him, and reads what he’s not saying. “Good luck, Doctor.”

“Thank you.” He gives her a smile. “Take care of yourself, old friend.”

“I will,” she says, and ends the call.

Ace finds him in the kitchen one morning, waiting for her to come down for breakfast. He makes sure the TARDIS keeps her room generally nearby, close enough that the smell of cooking will reach her so that he doesn’t have to go wake her up to make sure she comes down before their food gets cold. _He_ certainly isn’t about to eat the bacon. Disgusting stuff.

He’s halfway through buttering his toast when she waves her hands in his face and then snatches his book out of his off-hand. "I said _good morning,_ " she says, huffily.

"Good morning, Ace." Early morning grumpiness, a classic. It wouldn't be Ace without her bad temper.

She flips his book around to look at the cover and makes a face. "Professor, why are you reading something called _A Survey on the Development of Gallifreyan Nursery Rhymes Through the Middle of the Rassilon Era_?"

"Research, Ace," he says, and gestures at the stovetop. "Eat your breakfast, it's good for you."

"Can't you research something more _exciting?_ Like, spaceship crashes? Or planets that explode?" She pauses, and looks horrified in the middle of sliding eggs and bacon onto her plate. "We're not going to have to _listen_ to nursery rhymes, are we Professor?"

"No, no, of course not," says the Doctor, and smiles at her as she sits down. "It's just a personal curiosity, that's all. Now, what do you feel like doing today? There are a few leads I'm interested in investigating, or if you like we could go see the Painted Clouds of Zimian V. They’re supposed to be marvelous; I’ve been meaning to visit for centuries."

"Nah," says Ace, and grins over a full fork. "Let's blow up a government."

"Certainly not!”

" _Professor!_ "

"But," he adds, and holds up a finger, "I do know of a very large spaceship that I have been meaning to look in on, just in case there's something untoward happening in its guts. So, if you _promise_ to leave the Nitro-9 in the TARDIS..."

"Promise!" she says, with such enthusiasm that the Doctor almost believes her. What an excellent liar she is growing into. What a competent toppler of empires. What a shining example of the bravery and kindness the rest of the universe is missing. He really is so proud.

Well, the spaceship city's corrupt government will be a welcome distraction from the headache he's giving himself, trying to pry Gallifrey's secrets out of the grasp of its history books. Now, given what he knows about the political factions involved, how best to approach the situation… 

He misses Ace. He misses lots of people, many of whom are still alive, many of whom only hate him through his own doing, but most of all he misses Ace, with all her dark joy, and her anger, and her fear.

There are worlds out there that need saving, empires that need toppling, half-complete plots that need his attention. There is burnt toast out there, and storms, but it won’t be the same without Ace running up ahead into the explosions.

For the first time in a long, long while, he puts his plans on hold and decides the universe can wait.

He meets Rassilon.

"Tecteun! Welcome home," says the figure. It's wearing red, and it's as tall as Tecteun. It stares at her, and then crouches down and pats a bit of dust off her shoulder. "And who might this be?"

"This," says Tecteun, flicking the figure's hand away, "is who I wanted you to meet. My child."

"Your child," says the figure, slowly.

Tecteun ignores him. "Child, this is Rassilon. If you ever can't find me, you can trust him, understand?"

He meets Rassilon.

"This is the Game of Rassilon."

He is wearing his first (first?) face, and a shiver of recognition hums through him. He knows that voice, in the way that one Time Lord knows another, psychic imprints deeper than flesh and bone, biosignatures carried on waves of regeneration energy, ancient memory knit from the Vortex. He knows that voice, and he shivers, and he almost steps back.

This is Rassilon, and he should be happy that Borusa's plot is about to go terribly awry, but something is very, very wrong. And all he wants to do is run.

He meets Rassilon.

"I am Rassilon the Ressurected!"

No, that's not right. That hasn't happened yet.

Sometimes, he thinks about

His own people rip the time-sense out of him, leave him stumbling blind in three-dimensional space.

his exile. He remembers his exile, and calls it cruel, and knows that the emptiness in his head is what truly broke his trust in the Time Lords because even when he ran away with one of their greatest weapons tucked under an arm, he’d still believed in them, and he’d still been proud to be of their number. 

But, stranded, hanging onto only the tiny thread of mental connection with his TARDIS he’d been allowed to keep, the timelines and eddies and vortex so frustratingly out of reach, living each linear day terrified of the paradoxes he might be causing while he walked blind as the humans he was surrounded by, terrified, bereft, betrayed, he remembers the faith in him snapping: and he knows with a blank-eyed disremembered fear that this is not the first time. That— 

Dying, dying, one time six times thirteen times thirty times a hundred times— and blackness.

The Doctor blinks, and in the moment his eyes are closed, he understands.

Something was done to him. 

Something was _done_ to him, something was _stolen,_ and he doesn’t know _what._

Something vital, something essential, something not-just-his-memories, because memories are easy enough to find again, and the ebb and flow of them has ever encompassed his lives as he spins his own webs in the Web of Time. Not just his memories: something writ deeper, in his bones and veins and senses, in the thrum of energy during regeneration tearing him apart and making him whole, in his cells and in his timestream, and he does not know who Tecteun is but the child in his memories calls her mother, and calls her monster, and dies.

Outrage bubbles, turns to rage, feeds itself like ice through his veins, into his hearts. Idle curiosity becomes vengeful determination. Vengeful determination becomes frightening calm.

Nobody gets the better of him for long, and this has gone on long enough. He has no companion to catch in the crossfire, no pressing plots that need his attention. Not anymore. Instead, he has his mind, and his experience, and so very, _very_ much time. 

He steps out of the TARDIS. 

Bullets tear into his chest.

Later, he wakes up with a new face and a new mouth and new priorities, and he can’t remember what he’d been so angry about. He can’t remember anything at all.

**Author's Note:**

> pretend all the adventures with hex and benny and everyone else are shoved in the middle there somewhere, idk. i promised myself i wasn't gonna get too hung up on the expanded universe or like, continuity at all, while writing this, otherwise i would never have finished it  
> so make your own presumptions, canon is fake and everything is canon, maybe someday i'll even read lungbarrow, etc etc etc


End file.
